Review of John Fea's *Believe Me*

John Fea's Believe Me explains how it is that 81% of white evangelical Christians voted for a gold-plated grifter whose name was synonymous with greed and playboy excess; whose campaign was characterized by racism, insult, lies, and risible self-aggrandizement; and whose election absolutely gave the lie to their major political arguments of the last twenty years: that Bill Clinton lacked the character necessary and Barack Obama was an arrogant messiah.

Yet 81% voted for the man. And worse, white evangelicals continue to be his loyal base through the unending circus of the grotesque that is his presidency. No matter how low Trump goes, you can always find some prominent white evangelical willing to go on Fox and remind us, "we didn't elect a pastor!" (Apparently the gospel is nice to hear on Sundays but is no way to actually run things.) There is no shit we will not eat.

If you've wondered how did this happen?, Fea's Believe Me is the book you need to read.

Fea is unwaveringly #neverTrump, but he works through the immediate context with an even-handedness that understands evangelical fears about the dizzying cultural shift that took place during the Obama years. He reminds us that in 2008 Obama campaigned on the compromise view that homosexual unions should be recognized by the state but marriage ought to be reserved for a man and woman. A mere 8 years later the national debate was whether "man" and "woman" even existed as real categories. Eight years saw a fundamental revision of a linchpin of human society as long as there's been human society, served with a extra side of fear that drag queens might be sharing a bathroom with your little girl. The other major evangelical motivator was hatred of Hillary Clinton, which Fea justly calls out as un-Christian and marks the irony that such hatred drove evangelicals to embrace a man who embodied everything they hated about Hillary.

When Fea goes further back, the book gets especially difficult for a Christian reader like myself. I'd previously assumed that the lock-step alliance between American evangelicals and the Republican party began in the 70s with abortion, and increasing polarization caused Christians to glom onto positions that the Bible says little about (corporatism, deregulation, anti-unionism) or even positions that are in tension with a plain reading of the Bible (hawkish foreign policy, anti-environmentalism, opposition to programs to alleviate poverty or racial injustice, that opposition often expressed with a real disdain for the poor and minorities). But Fea convincingly argues that the alliance was actually forged in the civil rights era. White evangelicals fueled by racial fear embraced anti-federalism, hoping to hold out against desegregation.

Fear is the major theme of Fea's book. He traces evangelical fear from the inception of the country, through the Civil War, the civil rights era, and into the present day. It's a compelling case. It does, though, reveal a limitation of the book. Although Fea ends by looking at the civil rights movement as a model for a different kind of Christian politics, I was left with not much hope for such a movement. He makes a compelling case that the politics of evangelical fear is as old as our republic. So what grounds do we have for thinking things will be much different in our generation? I call this a limitation and not a flaw because Fea is a historian, not a minister or politician: his job is to explain the past, not navigate the present for us. In fact he acknowledges that he steps outside the task of the historian even in recommending the civil rights movement as a model for Christian political engagement. I hope we take him up on that. But if history is any guide...

Fea's other major point is that what he calls "the playbook of the Christian Right" is a flawed approach to Christian cultural engagement, but remains the dominant mode of evangelical action. That is, evangelicals continue to believe that the best way to "win the culture" is to win political fights, appoint the right justices, and use the power of the state to force a return to the "Christian America" they imagine (and that exists only in their imaginations, Fea argues). Trump's "Make America Great Again" taps subliminally into that desire, without bothering to specify what American Greatness looks like or when we were that way. It is an empty vessel for all the anxieties of Christians who feel their cultural influence waning.

Fea nails this point, too. In fact a lot more could be said than he goes in to: there could be chapters about the evangelical retreat from the arts and universities, about the self-ghettoing of evangelical subculture into our own anodyne book stores and music labels and movie studios. The brightest evangelical youth of my own generation were shipped off to political programs and thence to Republican internships (the next brightest to business school), and all were warned away from the academy, the arts, and non-profits devoted to goals other than political power.

The second limitation I see is that Fea writes as though white evangelicals made a free and rational (by which I mean "guided by reason," not "sensible") choice between Trump and Clinton. Despite his fine chapter on the history of the Christian Right, I think he underplays the extent to which the Republican party has completely colonized evangelical identity in America. In my reading of 2016, the vast majority of evangelicals were always going to vote Republican, no matter who the candidate was. 2016 was a perfect test case of that undying loyalty. Given the absolute worst candidate that could be imagined for a Christian voter, would he still pull the lever marked R? I'd like to see how James K A Smith's thesis that our reasons are manufactured (or imported from a friendly source) in order to justify the inclination of our hearts would intersect with Fea's account.

In particular, I'd like to see someone examine whether the "liturgical practices" (to use Smith's term) of evangelicalism incline evangelicals toward strongmen. In other words, maybe congregational polity and strong biblicism entail a direct line to Donald Trump. (After all, his most ardent support comes from Southern Baptists and Charismatics.) If you say that scripture alone is an authority and church offices are not, you denigrate the humble priest doing God's quiet work and demand instead a man who can exposit scripture with charisma and authority. The greater one's reach, the more emotional one's appeal, the greater sign of God's annointing, in this view of things. This creates a demand for demigods who can withstand the gaze of millions as they captivate the attention, move the emotions, speak with unshakable authority. Thus congregants are trained in the liturgy of celebrity-worship. This is a hypothetical musing and it could be totally wrong, but I'd like to see consideration of whether evangelicals turn to strongmen out of fear because that is merely human nature (and their identity as Christians has been subsumed into their identity as white Republicans), or because there is some endemic flaw in the evangelical expression of Christianity.

But if this is in fact a limitation and not just my idiosyncratic fusion of ideas that interest me, it is likely a limitation of Fea's form: a short book of public history, a genre I as a layman am especially thankful for and would not wish it to be other than it is. I much appreciate Fea's commitment to be a public historian, to share his specialized knowledge with a general readership so that we may apply it wisely. Believe Me is a timely and worthy book in that tradition, and I recommend it to anyone -- Christian or not -- who wants to understand the evangelical embrace of Donald Trump.